Summat fer Nowt?

If you can understand when your loved ones are too busy to give you any time,

If you can take criticism and blame without resentment,

If you can ignore a friend’s limited education and never correct him or her,

If you can resist treating a rich friend better than a poor friend,

If you can face the world without lies and deceit,

If you can conquer tension without medical help,

If you can relax without liquor,

If you can sleep without the aid of drugs,

If you can honestly say that deep in your heart you have no prejudice against creed, colour, religion, gender preference, or politics,

–Then you have almost reached the same level of spiritual development as your dog!

Now they say, you never get summat fer nowt? (Well happen they don’t speak English proper where you’re from but I reckon you’ll get the gist, you don’t get something for nothing.)
Well at least you don’t with Amazon.

You see I had a cunning plan; I’ve got a series of six rather good short stories, a mixture of detective, mystery, and fantasy. People who read them have been very glowing in their comments, so in an attempt to help more people find them, I produced a shorter version of the story, written purely to give away. Normally these tales are 20,000 words; this one is a bijou 8,000. It may be small but it’s perfectly formed.

Anyway I’d stick it on Amazon and get them to drop the price to zero because it was written to be given away. (Because I’m just nice like that, and not at all because I’m trying the crack dealers gambit of getting you hooked on the first free sample.)

Unfortunately whatever I did Amazon insisted in charging for the damned thing. I tried all the usual things and whatever I did, Amazon refused to drop the price. So finally I’ve taken it off Amazon.

You now have two choices. You can grab it from here as a pdf. No messing about, hopefully just click on the link and go on your way rejoicing.

Benor at his most helpful, Tallis in the background as a source of wisdom, Mutt merely being helpful. What could go wrong?
Note please don’t try cleaning your drains like this without seeking expert advice first

The way to get stuff on Amazon for free is this: publish it through Smashwords or Draft2Digital first, setting the price at free. This gets the work distributed to a bunch of ebook stores, notably Barnes & Noble. Once you see it in those places, you use Amazon’s “report a lower price” function (and I admit I can’t remember exactly how you find it, but I know it’s there), citing B&N as offering it at free. Then Amazon will “price match,” offering it for free on their sites. Note: you can’t do this if you choose to got with KDP Select, which requires exclusivity for 90 days. Another note: you can publish ebooks through Smashwords or D2D and charge money for them too, but if your price there is lower than on Amazon, you are open to getting “price matched.”

Most of my stuff AUK put out ‘Everywhere’ on pretty well every platform, but this one, because it was written as a lost leader I just put out myself. I put it on Instafreebie, reported it to Amazon, had friends report it to Amazon and even on the reporting form put on that I was giving it away free in person. None of this had any effect whatsoever. 😦